MMO Mutant: Son of Pong

[Hungkung]

This is a review, of sorts, of Vanguard Saga of "damned that shoulda worked". It's also sort of a rant on the MMO world in general, as well as a das kapital-ddilian muttering about big business and the art of the DM.

Who am I to kvetch? Nobody special, started with everquest, made the incestious rounds of Camelot, asheron's, Ultima, then a long stint in City of heroes, and a rather depressing couple of years in world of warcraft watching my personal playground become more and more territory of the cool kids.

--for those who are too young to understand, RPGs, pen&paper, started waaay-back in the days when cars were made of metal and it was still cool to smoke...they were: they were the province of the special kind of loser that created the modern day defintion of what is cool...or at least popular at the box office, and after all if you can make money on it, it must be cool. Ask paris hilton. They were played by the fat guys, the scrawny guys, the pimply guys, the mouth breathers, hair-greasers, and the near sighted.

in other words the salt of the earth.

We were happy, we finnaly had a thing, yeah we still got killed in gymn class but it was so much easier dealing with the towel snapping jocks when you 'just knew' if your lvl 9 mage was there things would be different. Then Gary Gygax got overthrown and TSR a happy little company generating dreams became a business. In two years dungeons and dragons went from being something that came in 4 books and a handful of adventure mods to being something that wouldn't fit into a foot locker. 2nd edition, 3rd edition, and with each ratchet of the money screws, the mouth breathers lost out to the simply unhappy kids, then even to the point where kids with no problems started playing, until --at least for a breif glorious moment between being a boy and being a teenager it was cool to play RPG's, if you were at the right summer camp.

While this transformation of the body-politic of nerdom was going on, video games went from being a 4 line tennis game to being Zork to being Might and Magic (1 through 10(to the 12 power)) then came everquest, (after a long daliance with online MUDS, if you don't know what those are, ask your mom) and wow..we had never seen anything like it, we didn't know it sucked at the time...it was...it was...it was a D&D game come to life, well life without smells, real blood or poopie on your shoes when you died.

and some game nerds had done it, they had pulled back the veil between imagination and interaction, never again did we only have to dream about our +4 vorperal sword, now we could see what it looked like. All the old mouth breathers who no longer had people to play with, because the fat kid had found a fatter girl, and the pimply kid had found a cure, they had gotten married and become real people and no longer had time for kids games, jumped into the pool of radiance that was Everquest like it was the cure for scabies.

Then came Sony, who had fianced some of this little nerddom dreams into reality, and they realized they had found the pot at the end of the rainbow, it was money for nuthin and your chicks for free. It was the ultimate in commerce, selling moving pixels on a computer screen that the company didn't even have to own. Then came the expansion after money-generating expansion. Now as a nerd, I would make sure I got every # issue of anything I was ever interested in, I had all the Han action figures, even the orginal small head which is something to brag about in the right circles, and I'd have bought the expansions out of obsession....but they were being created not to make the world a better world, but because I would buy them. Revenge of the Sith was made along these same principles.

and the game-nerd guru's who brought us this magic were shipped off to EQ2, to make an even bigger bestest world, at 14.95 a month. Then came the rest. It was looking for a date at a family reunion but we were happy, because there was a game for everybody, the knights and Wizards, the Spacemen, even the cyberpunkers.

Then came WoW.

And suddenly it was that moment of summer camp all over again, where playing these sorts of games was no longer purely a thing of nerdom, it was somethign even the cool kids did. People with the imaginaton of a fish-tank bound turtle could dream about the purples they'd get once they get to MC....and weirdly, the weird, the losers, the normal and the responsible all got along like never before, save for those glorious few weeks after Luke Skywalker was here to rescue you.

WoW as the best and worst thing to happen to the industry, there was no longer some money to be made in the online gaming industry, you could make trump money. And what had been hardcore players challanging themselves to the limit of what their asthma inhalers would allow became the market place for gold sellers, and the sad people who bought the gold, "because I have a job and don't have the same amount of time as people who spend 24 hours online".

Challange took a backseat to "I have 7 lvl 60 alts in tier 2 gear" and barrens chat became a verb.

Now we come to the review, aren't you glad you waited around?
Then came Vanguard, which promised the hardcorers a return to challange and meaning, of teeth-gnashing fun, and lack of personal hygyne immersion. but saddly the game's new daddy decided to make it a premie-birth and it is just possible now and again to remember to take a shower, and frustration of "is it bugged?" has replaced...."Ohhhh so close".

In the end vanguard will have to dumb down to compete, I hope they keep the style and the quests, the writers did a hell of a job of taking tried-and-trampled old ground and putting fresh spins on them. they managed somehow to put drama into fed-ex quests and made a player feel like they were involved in something from 2nd level and the discovery of diplomacy.

---side rant, if you don't see the point in diplomacy, you probably also don't see a point in roses, why opus while only a penguin was also a brillant political statement. Sometimes something can just be cool for the sake of cool...yeah it's redundant, but then so is tetris...or john madden football come to think of it.

Or vanguard will be off the shelves this time next year and some of us will have woeful memories of wishing it hadn't died on sony's abortionist's floor. There is so much that can be great in vanguard and so much that can reach a mass-audience, they need to figure out what will work to make them enough scratch so thier next attempt at magic works without a loan from men who'se idea of adventure is a monday when the stock exchange is down and they are twitching to get back into the game.

[Ysharros]

In the end vanguard will have to dumb down to compete

God I hope not. Sigil have said many, many times that though they wouldn't spit on WoW's subscription numbers, it's not what they're aiming for - or rather, they would be content with much less. No reason not to be - an article I'll reference if I can ever find it again stated, as a rule of thumb, that 10k subs per $million invested will eventually break a game even. If VG cost $40 million, 400k subs will do it - and that's more or less what they're aiming for at the moment.

As far as I can tell VG has started much more strongly than I expected. I hope, really hope that they don't compromise their vision too much in trying to entice people from the easier side of the fence. I'm not hardcore at all, but I *am* old-school, like you, and I like wandering around in the wilderness thinking I'm probably about to die horribly.

I've spent the last few weeks yakking mostly about crafting, venting, praising, helping and being helped. Being frustrated too, lots. Would I trade that for WoW's type of crafting? Get thee behind me!

Anyway, I'll always enjoy a well-written rantlet.